On Truth and Lying in a Nonmaterial Sense

One of the great lies of modernism was that people were primarily rational beings who could be taught, or programmed, into acting always in their own rational self-interest. Once the irrationality of faith was pried away, reason would reign triumphant and we would achieve Utopia, or so the general thinking went. In cultures where faith has largely been pried away, however, we find that this is hardly the case. 

I was listening to a campus preacher one time and his interlocutor was telling him how easy it is to be moral apart from religious commitment. You knew what was right, implicitly, the young man argued, the barometer being whether or not it was good for all parties involved, and morality was therefore simply a matter of following through with this inclination. The preacher replied, "So you always do what is good for you because you know it is right?" The young man said yes. I should mention at this point that in between his comments the young man was puffing on a cigarette. The preacher's reply was simple enough, and humorous: "Are you doing what is good for you now?" This is a small example, but indicative of that great fiction that if we know our self-interest (and it happens to line up nicely for all parties involved!) we will always act in line with it.

This, I think, has something to do with the famous postmodern rejection of truth. Once it became clear that truth was not always sufficient for human experience, was rather difficult to discern, and that humans have a hard time adhering to truth when they do apprehend it, many found it expedient to chuck the idea altogether. But this does not change the fact that truth does exist. You can close your eyes to it all you want, heap up fiction upon fiction, but truth remains true. 

But my point in this post is not explicitly about the reality of truth or postmodern error. What I want to emphasize here is that not acting in our rational self-interest all of the time is not a bad thing. The moderns were just as wrong as the postmoderns. Truth does exist, but depending upon how we talk about it, it is not transcendent or total. And by truth here I mean the truth of the moderns. Purely material truth, abstracted from anything metaphysical. I would argue that truth in this sense is often dehumanizing, reducing us to mere quantitative machines, coldly evaluating self-interest at the expense of other considerations. In other words, truth in this sense is extremely individualistic and denies community. 

Modern notions of truth can still be true, in a material and rational sense. But generally only in that sense. A few years ago Thomas Frank wrote a book with a title more famous than it's thesis, What's the Matter With Kansas?. In the book, Frank makes the classic elitist argument that if people in Kansas and other places in Middle America really knew what was best for them they would be Democrats. The reasoning, of course, is couched in almost purely material terms: the Democrats give more money to the poor and Middle Americans are poor, so their rational self-interest ought to lead them to support the party of the welfare state. But the dumb yokels are entrenched in social issues and other political concerns that don't touch their checkbooks. What this argument abnegates is the other very real motivations that humans act on, those apart from the almighty dollar. Perhaps more constitutive to the identity of the confused Kansas Republican is not his status as poor, or lower middle class, but his religious faith, his moral vision, his idea of community, his independence from the state. The cold rationalist cannot see these deeper meanings, these transcendent truths, because they cannot be quantified and bear with them the stench of faith, that discarded wrecker of the world.

But no one sees the world completely rationally, whatever that may mean and presuming we could agree on a meaning. And that is fine. Mandated rationality is another form of tyranny. We are more than material beings with more than material concerns. Any truth that denies that is of limited value and rightly rejected.